Harvest School

Harvest School

How joyful are those who fear the LORD—all who follow his ways! You will enjoy the fruit of your labor. How joyful and prosperous you will be!

Psalm 128:1-2

In our home, when the children helped out with tasks, we considered those tasks their “chores.” In the Amish community, harvest work is part of a child’s education.

[Benny Mast’s] education ended at eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse just a few miles away. When he turns 21 he’ll be free to buy land, marry and settle down. Until then he works for his father, at his brother’s sawmill and for neighbors during harvest.

“This is our college,” he said. “We learn by working.” If the field were a classroom, the Amish men were star students.

“Hey,” 15-year-old Andy Yerdon said to his horses, in a normal speaking voice. His calm draft team walked 10 feet. “Ho,” he said and they stopped.

He didn’t even have to touch the reins; just kept tossing bundles.

“The English ask horses to do things,” he said. “We Amish, we just tell them. They know their work.”

In the hours of cool morning it seemed easy. The workers were methodical. In a career of deadlines, the crisp air and steady physical labor seemed a welcome change from the usual desk shift.

Then the sun broke the tree line.

When the sun rises and warms the sky, the work gets harder, but it’s only in our “modern” society that people consider hard work a bad thing. Today, people put more stock in book knowledge than in experience, but that isn’t the only knowledge there is. Knowing how to harvest corn, how to work with horses, and how to work the land is worth passing down. Sometimes we forget that the things our children learn in school are just a portion of what they need to know in life.

“Direct your children onto the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it,” we read in Proverbs 22:6. The right path encompasses more than book knowledge, and what children learn from working hard can be just as valuable.

Dear heavenly Father, strengthen my back and help me teach Your ways to the generations that come after me.